The nature of consciousness remains deeply mysterious and profoundly important, with existential, medical and spiritual implication. We know what it is like to be conscious – to have awareness, a conscious ‘mind’, but who, or what, are ‘we’ who know such things? How is the subjective nature of phenomenal experience – our ‘inner life’ - to be explained in scientific terms? What consciousness actually is, and how it comes about remain unknown. The general assumption in modern science...

In their BBS Target Article, Lane et al (2014) recommend eliciting traumatic memory with concomitant positive emotional experience to ‘re-consolidate’ an alternative memory, over-writing, if not erasing the trauma, leading to psychotherapeutic benefit. In this worthy effort the authors claim new insight from brain science, but lack (as does mainstream science in general) actual neurobiological mechanisms for emotional experience (consciousness), and memory (encoding, consolidation/re-consolidation, storage and recall). When asked why he robs banks, the notorious criminal Willie Sutton famously answered: “because that’s where the money is!” To delete or over-write traumatic memories, we need to know where and how they are encoded and consolidated. And improving conscious experience (an essential therapeutic goal) might be far easier if we knew how it was mediated. It is my contention (definitely a minority contention, but one supported by evidence) that in contrast to conventional wisdom, both memory and consciousness are rooted inside brain neurons, in vibrational states of microtubules.

Mainstream science considers consciousness to emerge from complex computation among brain neurons, each acting as fundamental units of information. But such views lack specifics and fail to generate testable predictions. Moreover, single cell organisms such as paramecia exhibit complex cognition (e.g. finding food and mates, sex and learning) without synaptic connections, using their cytoskeletal microtubules. These same microtubules are found inside brain neurons, as major components of the cytoskeleton, self-assembling to shape neurons and regulate synapses. They are lattice polymers of tubulin, the brain’s most prevalent protein, and theorized to process and store information (Hameroff and Watt, 1982; Rasmussen at al, 1990). Microtubule disruption, e.g. in Alzheimer’s disease, correlates with cognitive dysfunction.

A maverick theory of consciousness (Penrose-Hameroff ‘orchestrated objective reduction’, ‘Orch OR’, e.g. Penrose and Hameroff, 1995; Hameroff and Penrose, 2014) suggests quantum vibrational computations in microtubules inside brain neurons 1) produce conscious experience, and 2) regulate neuronal firings and synaptic plasticity. In Orch OR, microtubule quantum vibrations are ‘orchestrated’ (‘Orch’) by synaptic inputs and memory (encoded in microtubules), and terminated by ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’), Penrose’s solution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics (Penrose, 1989). Orch OR has been viewed skeptically and harshly criticized, as the brain has been considered too ‘warm, wet and noisy’ for seemingly delicate quantum effects. But in recent years warm quantum biology has been recognized in photosynthesis, bird navigation, olfaction, and in microtubules.

To erase or over-write traumatic memory, to change the music and re-tune the tubules, combinations of pharmacology, psychotherapy and TUS (e.g. aimed at microtubule vibrations in amygdala, hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex) may be optimal. As the Beatles sang, “Take a sad song and make it better”.